Today we’re finding out all about the wonder that is the Line Space button. Do you know what it does? Did you know it was even there? And did you know how many ways there are to get to the Paragraph menu …? All this and more in today’s Short Cuts!

What is line spacing and why do I need to know about it?

Line spacing defines a large portion of what your document looks like on the page. It’s all about the gaps between the lines you type. Too close together, and your document can be hard to read. Too far apart, and there aren’t enough words on the page, with all that white space glaring at you. Of course, sometimes you’re told that your work must be presented in a particular way – double line spaced is popular for both academic work and fiction being submitted to a publisher or magazine.

It’s also really useful to be able to insert a gap between paragraphs automatically, to save you having to insert one manually – and if you find you’re working on a document that has odd spacing (or, worse, inconsistent spacing!) between lines and paragraphs, this is how you sort it out.

How do I alter the spaces between lines in my document?

We’re in Word 2007 or Word 2010 now, with that handy “ribbon” containing hundreds of little square buttons. Make sure you’re in the Home tab and have a look at the Paragraph section. You should find a button with up and down arrows to the side and lines of text in the middle: the Line Space button. There’s a big version at the top of this post, and you can find it here:

When using this button, or indeed anything that changes the word, line, paragraph, page or whole document that you are working on, make sure you’ve highlighted the text to which you want the change to apply first. Then click on the button and see what choices you are presented with:

The first thing you’ll notice is that one of the line spacing options (in the top half of the box) is already ticked, and you have an option to Remove Space After Paragraph (in the bottom part of the box) which, you can see by comparing it to the line above it, implies that there is a space set to appear after each paragraph at the moment. So one useful feature here is that clicking on the paragraph and then the line space button will tell you what is already set up for that part of the document. In this case, the spacing is 1.15 (just a little bigger than single line spacing) and there’s an extra line space after each paragraph.

Let’s try changing something …

Here, we’ve changed the line spacing to 1 and clicked on Remove Space After Paragraph, so it’s flipped to saying Add Space After Paragraph (red arrows). And look what’s happened (immediately) to our highlighted text. All of the lines are closer together, and the space between the paragraphs has disappeared (blue arrow).

We can change it back and go the other way, too …

This image is at the same scale as all of the other ones, but you can see that changing the line spacing to 1.5 and adding spaces before and after the paragraphs has really spaced it out, and moved it further down the page to start off with.

Now, there’s one line in the dialogue box we haven’t looked at yet: Line Spacing Options… What does that do?

How do I use Line Spacing Options?

The Line Spacing Options … erm, option can be found between the line spacing and paragraph spacing choices:

When you click it, you’ll be given a new dialogue box, which is actually the standard Paragraph options box. It has two tabs, and the first one is Indents and Spacing:

If you want to customise your document completely, this is where you come to set the paragraph indent, and the actual distance between paragraphs. There’s a handy Preview pane at the bottom which will show you the effect of any changes you make on some sample text (circled in blue). You can also work with Tabs from here – we talked about Tabs in another session. And, if you wish, you can change everything on here and then set it as being your default setting for paragraphs for this documents, or all documents based on this template that you ever work on:

The other tab on this dialogue box is all about Line and Page Breaks:

These are topics in themselves, so I’ll write about them in another session (if I forget to come back and put a link in here, use the Search box in the right hand column of this blog, or look it up in my index).

When you’ve finished with all of these options, just press the OK or Cancel buttons to accept your changes or go back to the document.

How do I access the Paragraph menu?

This being Word, you will find the same Paragraph menu we’ve just been looking at popping up on other routes through the software. If you just need the Paragraph menu and not the Line Spacing options in particular, you can access it from any Word document by highlighting your text, clicking with the right mouse button and selecting Paragraph from the selection that appears:

Or you can access it by clicking on the little tiny arrow at the bottom of the Paragraph title bar (if that’s what it’s called!) on the ribbon (I talk about these little arrows elsewhere, too):

I hope you’ve found these hints helpful! Do pop a comment on this post if I’ve helped you learn something new or solved a tricky problem for you, and do explore the rest of my blog if this is your first visit!

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents. Find all the short cuts here …

Here’s the last part of my series on working with Track Changes. We’ve already learned what Track Changes is, why we use it and where to find it, and how to customise Track Changes to suit our own preferences. Now it’s time to learn how to work with a document that has Tracked Changes – i.e. how to get rid of all those marks and comment boxes and be left with a clean document with no errors.

Why do I need to work with Track Changes in a document?

These instructions will be useful to anyone who has their work edited, critiqued or otherwise commented on by other people. For example, I work in Track Changes with all of my student customers, because they need to see what I’m suggesting they should change so they can make the decisions and retain their understanding and authorship of their own texts.

If a text has Track Changes on it and you want to submit it for your Master’s or PhD, a journal, a magazine that publishes creative writing … you need to remove those Tracked Changes so they don’t show up when someone else reads your document.

(Note: in the last article we looked at how the different views of track changes don’t actually delete the changes – review this article for more information in the section “How can I change which changes I can see?”)

How do I remove the Track Changes markup from my document?

To get back to basics, you’ll find all the buttons and drop-downs you need in the Review tab in Word 2007 or 2010 (or the Tools dropdown in Word 2003):

We’re looking at the Accept / Reject area to the right of this section, and then the New Comment / Delete area to the left.

And let’s just remind ourselves what a document with Track Changes looks like: here’s the one we’ve been working on for a little while now. Additions show up in red underlined, deletions disappear and pop into a comment box, and comments and corrections appear in different colours depending on who entered them:

So, first of all you will need to look at each of the changes that are showing in your document and decide whether to accept or reject them. Then you need to review all the comments, make the necessary amendments, and delete the comment. Finally, you need to check that all the markup has actually disappeared, and you’re left with a nice clean document.

How do I accept changes in a document?

The area you need to look at for accepting (and rejecting) changes is that section in the middle of the Review tab that looks like this.

You will notice that there’s a little arrow on the Accept button; if you drop that down you get a range of choices. Let’s see what happens if you position the cursor by the change you want to accept and hit Accept Change:

You can see that the word “text” has stopped being underlined and changed from red to black. You have accepted the change, and the additional text has basically become part of the actual, final version of the document now.

You can Accept and Move to Next if you want to skip through all of the changes one by one – a good option to take that ensures you don’t miss one. Or you can do this manually using those blue arrows to the right of the Accept and Reject buttons. Or, you can choose Accept All Changes:

If you do this, as you can see, all of the tracked changes (but not the comment boxes) disappear.

Note: I don’t encourage student clients to do this, as I prefer them to look at every change and accept or reject it individually. However, I use this option if I have been asked to provide two versions of a document for a client: one with changes marked and one “clean” copy. It’s a quick way of accepting all the changes I’ve made and seeing what I’m left with.

You can undo any individual Accept Change or Accept All Changes, immediately after you’ve done it, by hitting the Undo button:

How do I reject changes in a document?

Rejecting changes is done in exactly the same way as Accepting changes. Obviously, if your editor has suggested a change for you, they are the expert and it’s worth seriously considering accepting it. But there could be a choice involved (with a comment box nearby explaining it) or you could be working collaboratively with a colleague and deciding to reject a change one of you has made.

Anyway, there’s a Reject button with a dropdown arrow, and the choices are the same, when you place the cursor by a marked change, allowing you to reject just that change or reject it and move on to the next one …

When you reject this change, you will see that the text will revert back to what it said originally, with a word missing. The insertion has been deleted, and again there is nothing there in red or underlined, but that’s because it has been removed from the document.

And again, you can decide to Reject All Changes (not if I’ve made them for you, though!), in which case …

… all of the changes (but not the comments) will disappear and you’ll be left with your original textt, just as it started out. Of course, you won’t want to do this if you’ve asked an editor to offer their suggestions, but you need to know what this does and how to use it.

How do I remove the comments in a document?

OK, so we’ve gone through all of the changes in the text and accepted or rejected them. Now how do we get rid of all those comments in the margin?

The area for doing this is on the left of the Review section. You will see a series of buttons for handling comments:

The important thing to remember here is that, like with the accept or reject changes functions, you need to have the cursor on the affected text when you choose to delete the comment.

When you press the Delete Comment button, both the highlight in the text and the comment box in the margin will disappear:

You can choose to Delete all Comments: I suppose this would be useful if you’ve reviewed all the comments and done what they say, although personally I like to review a comment, do what it instructs, then delete the comment individually, and that’s how I would always recommend you work through them.

Anyway, once you have accepted or rejected all the changes, and deleted all the comment boxes, you should be left with a clean, amended text with no coloured or underlined text, no lines in the left hand margin, and no comment boxes:

Why can’t I make all the Tracked Changes disappear?

You may sometimes find that there are some sneaky bits of markup left in your text once you’ve done all the above. This usually shows up as lines in the margin where a small change has been made.

The other culprit is thinking that you can use the Final Showing Markup menu to hide the track changes. You can’t. Any method you use to customise track changes will only appear in your own version on your own computer. Several of my clients have reported that they have turned off Track Changes, then all the changes have “reappeared” when they re-opened the document. That’s because they had chosen the Show Final option, thinking they had removed the markup but really only hiding it on their version of the document.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, review this paragraph under the heading “How can I change which changes I can see?” for more information on this aspect of customising track changes..

In summary: the only way to remove Track Changes markup is to:

• Go through each change
• Decide whether you accept it
• Accept or reject it
• Move on to the next item
• Review the comments and do whatever you are instructed to do
• Remove the comments once you have reviewed them

If any last vertical lines then remain in the left hand margin, it’s fine to hit Accept all Changes, which will get rid of them once and for all.

———-

This article has taught you how to work with a document that has been marked up using Track Changes. You can read more about what Track Changes is and why we use it, and learn how to customise Track Changes.

If you have found this article useful, please share or “like” it using the buttons below, or leave me a comment to tell me what you think. Thank you!

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

So how do I customise Track Changes (and why would I want to?). Previously, we learned about why you might want to use Track Changes and how to find and use it to delete and add text and make comments. Now we’re going to go one step further and customise it all (and you can also find out how to work with a text that contains tracked changes).

So, here’s our original text with some changes tracked that we created last time:

Why customise Track Changes?

Customising Track Changes basically makes things more comfortable for you and means you can work in a way that suits you. For example, some people like to cross out text in a document, like if you were editing a written manuscript, while others like to remove the deleted text altogether and place it to one side.

Please note: This is customising your view of the document. It’s personal to you, your computer and your document. When someone else opens the document, they will not necessarily see what you see, especially if you’ve customised it away from the defaults. Note this, because it becomes ever so important later on …

How do I customise Track Changes?

Your key area for this is the Review tab, then the section marked Tracking. You can change three things:

• Tracking Options themselves (the colours and fonts that mark the changes)
• Balloons (whether changes are marked within the text or to the side of it)
• Final showing markup (which changes show in your version of the text)

We’ll look at these in turn, and also at what happens when more than one person makes changes to the document.

How do I change the tracking options?

To change the tracking options you need to click on the little arrow at the bottom right of the Track Changes button. This gives you another way to turn Track Changes on and off, a menu item to click to access the tracking options, and a final item we’ll look at later on.

For now, let’s click on that middle menu item. Up pops a great big dialogue box with all sorts of things to change:

I think this is fairly self-explanatory. On the left hand side, you can change how the text appears when you do something to it (underline, double underline, etc.) and on the right hand side you can change the colour.

Let’s change some things …

So here we’ve changed insertions and deletions to double underlines and double crossings-out and the comments to blue. Watch what happens to our text (actually, the crossing-out won’t show up until the next section … )

Because the crossings-out are shown in balloons, not in the text, we can’t see them. But that will all change …

How do I customise the balloons?

Now we’re moving on to talk about what appears in balloons and what appears “inline” or in the text itself.

Important note: This is not how you change what comments themselves look like. For that, you will need to see my posts on comment boxes.

The menu we need here is the next one to the right of the Track Changes button, called, inventively, Balloons:

At the moment, Show Revisions in Balloons is ticked. Note that to change between the options, you need to tick the one you want – no unticking allowed! Try ticking Show All Revisions Inline:

and watch what happens to the document. Gone is the right hand margin, gone are all the balloons, and instead you can see what has been crossed out, and you can only read comments by hovering the mouse over the note indicating there is a comment:

Now, personally I don’t like it looking like this, but some people do.

For more information than you would ever want on how to further customise your balloons, please see my article on customising comment text.

How do I change which changes I can see?

You can review particular changes individually using the next button along: Show Markup. Drop it down and you can see that you can choose to see various kinds of correction, and also only changes made by a particular person:

I don’t think I need to show you examples of all of these – have a play with them and you can see what’s what.

Above this menu item is Final Showing Markup. Now: this is important. Yes, you can choose how you view the document …

For example, you can choose Final and you’ll see the document in its final form with no changes showing:

But: REMEMBER – this is all about what YOU can see. The Tracked Changes have not gone away: they’re still on the document, just hidden. So if you send the document to someone else, they can change their view and see all your changes and comments! Eeps!

You can only “get rid” of changes and comments by accepting or rejecting them, individually or en masse, and that’s a job for next week’s post.

How can I tell which reviewer has made which comments?

If more than one of you is reviewing the document, Track Changes  makes it easy to see who said what. All you need to do is make sure that the “by author” option is chosen in Tracking Options …

… and your comments and alterations will appear in different colours:

Again, avoid telling the other person, “Oh, my comments will appear in blue”, as it’s up to the individual and their own computer as to what colours will appear.

How do I change my initials in comments?

If you want to change your initials in the comments, perhaps because there are two reviewers with the same first initial, you need to go back to Tracking Options and choose Change User Name. This will bring up the Word Options dialogue box, and at the bottom you can change the initials that appear in the comments balloon:

Next time I make a comment, my initials have changed!

However, please note that when I change L to LB here, the change takes effect from that moment, and is not applied retrospectively. Well, you can’t have everything!

A final note

You may want to pin some of your most common choices to the Quick Access Toolbar – read this article to find out how.

So, we already knew how to find Track Changes, today we’ve learned how to customise Track Changes so it works just as we want it to. Next time, we’ll be talking about how to work with the Track Changes you, or someone else, has applied to the document, leaving it nice and tidy and clean! And there will be a separate article on formatting comment balloons, coming soon. In the meantime, if you want to customise the text in your comment balloons or it goes all small or runs from right to left, click on the appropriate links to find out what to do.

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …